Thoughts on book publishing, editing, contemporary poetry, dementia, administrative memos, and teaching by the editor of Tinfish Press.

Friday, June 8, 2012

My contribution to the Asian American Literary Review

Last January I got the following invitation:

inquiry from The Asian American Literary Review

Dear Ms. Schultz:

Hello, my name is Lawrence-Minh Davis; I'm the editor of The Asian
American Literary Review. For our upcoming third issue, we're putting
together a forum based on the question below, and I'd really like it to
include some perspective on writing by Pacific Islanders, Hawaiians, and
Asian Americans in Hawaii, something I thought you'd be ideally
positioned to provide, given your tenure with UH and Tinfish. The
response could be relatively short, as short as 400 words, though longer
would be fine as well, and you could feel free to stray from the prompt
as you see fit. The deadline is late spring, maybe early summer 2011.
I hope you'll be interested.

I look forward to hearing back from you. Happy new year!

Thanks, and best,

Lawrence
Editor, AALR

The issue is now out, so I'm putting on-line the contents of my response. But really, buy one; there are a lot of fascinating responses, including one by my colleague, Gary Pak.

I've done tiny edits because I must, and added a few links to this and that.

Susan M. Schultz

[The opening quotation came with the invitation to participate.]

The notion of an “Asian American”
literature emerged at the end of the 1960s and the start of the
1970s, when members of a generation just reaching their adulthood
began to connect their commitment to left politics with creative
expression. A few short decades later, we find ourselves witnessing a
flowering of literature by Asian Americans that would have been hard
to predict. Are there any continuities between the earlier generation
of writers which first raised the banner of an Asian American
literature and a later generation of writers which inherited it? Does
it even make sense to talk about contemporary American writers of
Asian ancestry as comprising a generation, and if so, what are some
of their shared commitments?

I am not an expert in Asian American
literature. I am a publisher of “experimental poetry from the
Pacific region,” as the mission statement for Tinfish Press, which
I've edited since 1995, puts it. Tinfish does not publish Asian
American poetry as such (or poetry by members of any other groups).
But we do publish poetry by Asian Americans, which is why I've been
asked to contribute to this round-table. Whether or not the poetry I
publish can be considered “Asian American” may have to do with
the hinge distinction Timothy Yu makes in writing about the critical
reception of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dictee. According
to Yu, in Race and the Avant-Garde: Experimental and Asian
American Poetry since 1965, Dictee has
been read as Asian American writing or
as experimental writing. The poetry Tinfish publishes is
experimental, but a good deal of the content of the work has to do
with the experience of being Asian American. And so we swing on the
hinge that Cha crafted.

Let
me begin with a stark contrast, one I can quarrel with a bit later.
Over the past eight months, Tinfish has been putting out one chapbook
a month in our Retro Chapbook Series, which will end after one year.
Three of our titles have been by Asian American writers, namely Mao's
Pears, by Kenny Tanemura,
yellow/ yellow, by
Margaret Rhee, and ligature strain,
by Kim Koga. These last two are both by women in their 20s, but the
chapbooks could not seem more different from one another. Margaret
Rhee's chapbook is about being Korean American (as well as about
being queer). In the opening poem, “Nectarines,” she writes
about the (unmarked) hyphen between Korean and American as being like
a nectarine, half one organism and half another. As we find out in
the poem, the nectarine was developed by two Korean brothers, the
Kims. She then poses a racist statement by Jack London (who is
always good for such insults) against the words of Terry Hong: “I
consider myself Korean and American. A Korean American is a hybrid
product of / both the U.S. And Korean countries and cultures.”
According to her biography at the back, Rhee is a hybrid
poet-scholar, as well. She “writes poetry in the morning, teaches
ethnic lit in the afternoon, and researches race, gender, and
sexuality at night.” Hence her “hybrid” might be said to
encompass the categories of Asian American and experimental poet,
bringing together the two halves of the reception of Dictee.

Kim
Koga's bio note begins with her professional qualification, namely an
MFA from Notre Dame. Nowhere in her note does she mention being
Asian American. Instead, she lists publications and her curation of
a reading series, as well as her work for Action Books. All we have
to mark her as Asian American is her name. (As my children are
Asian, but have my European last names—Webster Schultz—I know
that names alone do not reveal one's ethnicity.) Her chapbook more
resembles the work of the Korean poet Kim Hyesoon, who has written
many poems in the voices of rats (including those in Tinfish Press's
chapbook, When the Plug Gets Unplugged,
translated by Don Mee Choi) than it does poems marked as “Asian
American.” Koga writes about a beaver giving birth. The only
people in these prose poems are referred to obliquely: “the beavers
leave the gate open and hail away to cities and in habit your water.
Fill cases of sewer detritus small pipelines of little bits of pink
fleshes—come for teeth and shower nozzles—you bathe in squirming
pink fleshes.” Where Kim Hyesoon's poems engage South Korean
politics and historical events, Koga's poems engage contemporary
ecopoetics.

Last
year Tinfish published a chapbook by a 20-something Hawai`i writer,
Gizelle Gajelonia, whose family came with her to Hawai`i from the
Philippines when she was nine years old. Thirteen Ways ofLooking at TheBustakes several
angles of approach. Gajelonia rewrites famous American poems,
including Wallace Stevens's studies of the blackbird and Elizabeth
Bishop's of the moose (here a mongoose), by moving them onto the bus
system on the island of O`ahu. She often uses Pidgin, or Hawaii
Creole English, instead of the standard. She also employs Tagalog, a
language she has mostly forgotten but overhears on the TheBus. And
she also engages issues of being Filipino in a place where many
native Hawaiians feel that their land is occupied. Hawai`i is one
place where Asian Americans are sometimes seen not as a struggling,
or even model, minority, but as powerful interlopers. (The Asian
Settler Colonialist model is not one I find compelling, but students
in my English department have to reckon with it.) Her finest moment
is a rewriting of The Waste Land to
include the words of Hawai`i's last queen, Liliu`okalani. Finally,
she writes a prayer for Ikaika, a boy on the high school football
team that her speaker has a crush on.

Our one full-length
book of this year is by Jai Arun Ravine, a Thai-American transgender
poet (female to male), and then entwine. If Asian American poetry can be said often to
be about issues of identity and family, then this book fits. But if
racial identity is marked more as language—the book works a seam
between Thai and American English, then moves into questions of
documentation, like birth certificates and visas—then the book
expands that category. As language and race are not inevitably
joined (as the name issue elucidates, and Ravine has changed his name
repeatedly), this book questions Asian Americanness as it goes.
And, if Asian American literature of the 1970s was obsessed with food
as a cultural marker, then Ravine's book, by presenting us with
instructions on how to peel a mango, joins in and deviates from that
tradition.

What
the book and chapbooks I've been writing about so far have in common,
oddly enough, is an emphasis on sexuality and gender, as well as
engagements with language (Rhee's, Gajelonia's, and Ravine's, in
particular). If 1970s literature came out of a liberation movement
in part enabled by the Civil Rights Act of 1965, then the literature
of the early 21st
century builds on that movement by linking it to others—feminism
and gay rights foremost among them. 21st
poetry is highly synthetic, but its originality is in the ways in
which ingredients are mixed, or mangoes and nectarines are created,
and then peeled. It also grafts onto many strands of American
poetry, by Asian and other writers, hybridizing, peeling, and
consuming them as it goes.

One
recent Tinfish book that deals directly with the Asian American
experience is Kaia Sand's Remember to Wave,a
long poem focused on a walk to the Expo Center in North Portland
where Japanese Americans were first rounded up, before being interned
in the interior of the continent. This book, down to its
appreciative blurb by Lawson Fusao Inada, participates in an
important tradition of Asian American writing about that awful,
immoral period in American history. That it was written by a woman
whose birth heritage is Norwegian only complicates the question. It
complicates matters in ways that are typical, I hope, of Tinfish's
publishing practice. We seek to explore history and culture, but we
do not want overmuch to attach them to racial categories.

About Me

My books include Aleatory Allegories (Salt), And Then Something Happened (Salt), Memory Cards & Adoption Papers (Potes & Poets), Dementia Blog (Singing Horse), Memory Cards: 2010-2011 Series (Singing Horse), A Poetics of Impasse in Modern and Contemporary American Poetry and edited collections on John Ashbery (Alabama) and on multiformalisms (Textos), the latter with Annie Finch. Tinfish Press recently published Jack London is Dead: Euro-American Poetry of Hawai`i (and some stories), which I edited (2013). My newest book is volume two of Dementia Blog, "She's Welcome to Her Disease" (Singing Horse Press, 2013). Tinfish Press can be found at tinfishpress.com